Tutorial: Creating your first plug-in step-by-step

A plug-in is basically a web site that serves HTML pages, which can be seamlessly embedded into Haiilo Home pages with the purpose of displaying additional information or provide interfaces to 3rd party systems, without the need to leave the Haiilo Home page. A Haiilo Home administrator has to install and enable a plug-in on a Haiilo Home system. The plug-in is then made available as widget and content maintainers may add it to pages and all places that can display a widget.

Since a plug-in is decoupled from the Haiilo Home system you can choose any technology you like to serve the HTML. You could for instance use Node.js and Express.

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Attention

If the plug-in processes or even stores GDPR relevant data you have to ensure that this is done in a compliant way and does not violate GDPR rules. Your technology stack and tools should support you in writing secure and maintainable code.

Tutorial plug-in application

All code of our plug-in step-by-step guide can be found on gitlab.

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Hosting the demo project

This demo project is set up to be hosted at Heroku. You may, however, serve your plug-in from the hosting service of your choice.

In the first steps, we only need to serve a static website, so no backend application hosting required.

If you also want to go with Heroku and are new to it, you might want to check out the Getting Started with Node.js on Heroku tutorial. and the guide on Deploying existing Node.js applications.

The demo project uses Node.js and Express to serve static resources at Heroku.
We will first only be interested in the static content of the project which can be found in the /public directory.